Fairmont has been a public company - we went public in 2001 three weeks after September 11 and we had a very successful period in terms of a public company then we were taken private in 2006 and what we’ve been doing since we’ve taken the company private is selling off all our real estate, and turning the company into a high growth brand and management company with the expectation that at sometime in the future we’ll take the company public again.
As the president of the company are you saying ‘we need to be going in this direction’ – do all those decisions land on you?
We have a very interesting company structure - the senior leadership of Fairmont, Raffles hotels has been together for on average about 12 years now and so we’ve all worked together through al these various iterations of the company and so while each of us has a particular skill set and an area of responsibility.
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We really do act as a team and so each of us is encouraged to have our point of view on what do you think needs to be happening with the strategy, does it impact in your area of responsibility?
But at the end of the day we get all those points of view on the table, we synthesise it and say ok this is the direction we want to go in.
What is the one thing that Fairmont is doing absolutely right at the moment and the one thing it needs to focus on more.
I think that the thing we are doing right is continuing to hire, motivate and empower the best possible colleagues we can find. I think we’re quite good and that and we’ve been doing that for a long period of time.
I think the thing that we can focus more on is creating a greater level of functional consistency across our portfolio without sacrificing the unique experience that each of our properties are.
How does a company go about implementing that, especially when you’re going down the management route and there are property owners to answer too? How do you start that challenge of cutting back, but at the same time keeping service levels?
Well, you know it’s interesting – it’s a great question. There’s not one thing that you can do - there’s no silver bullet, but I think it’s a combination of things.
First of all, you’ve got to clearly understand what you’re about, what makes you different, how do you think you’re going to win and how do you set the priorities on that.
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